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Lagos Island and part of Lagos Harbour, taken from close to Victoria Island, looking north-west (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Alaba Market, in Nigeria’s commercial capital of Lagos, is a chaotic mass of noise, vehicles and electronics shops; open air stalls selling software and movies of dubious provenance and tiny dark rooms housing the country’s ruthlessly profiteering film producers.

Financed at Alaba and filmed in houses-turned-sets, ‘Nollywood’ has become a $500 million-a year business, the second largest film industry in the world by volume and Africa’s biggest by some distance. Its video CDs and DVDs—some legitimate copies, many not—play in households and businesses throughout Africa and African communities worldwide, where its settings and universal stories of redemption, lust and greed resonate.

Jason Njoku, a British-Nigerian serial entrepreneur, has built a world leader in Nollywood distribution online—a for the African Diaspora. His company, Iroko, took a globally-consumed but little understood product and built a business model around ease of access, solving many of the problems of intellectual property along the way. The company has six million viewers in 178 countries

Through Tiger Global and his new company, Rise Capital, Nazar Yasin has twice invested in Iroko, most recently in December 2013. He is one of a growing group of international investors awake to the potential of African content businesses.

‘When you look at what’s going on in Africa, there’s obviously a large population there—about a billion people. Up to 70 percent of the content that those people consume is African origin content,” Yasin says.

Iroko, which has expanded into music, post-production and licensing of movies for inflight entertainment, and sits in a pivotal point in the industry, able to identify and guide trends, according to Yasin.

For the time being, the company’s biggest audience is online and outside of Africa. CEO Njoku has said several times that the real growth will come once the continent itself opens up. For content providers, domestic and international, access remains a huge problem.

“There are fewer than 50 movie theaters in sub-Saharan Africa,” Yasin says. “There are only 6-7 million pay TV households in all of Africa. There’s not a lot of broadcast TV. There’s not a lot of ways to actually access content,” Yasin says. “Then consider the fact that most people... do have a mobile phone.”

The answer, then, will be online, and more likely than not, it will be mobile.

The mobile telecommunications boom in sub-Saharan Africa was one of the loudest signifiers of the region's economic development over the last decade. Without hard-wired telephone networks, cellphones spread rapidly, with penetration in some countries now approaching saturation point.

As well as launching multi-billion dollar investments into African telecoms businesses, the arrival of near-ubiquitous cellphones drove a wave of innovation by local entrepreneurs. On the back of a breakthrough in mobile payments, the Kenyan capital Nairobi has become a haven for risk-taking venture capitalists searching for the big thing in frontier markets tech. Lagos could soon follow, backed by local and international financiers.

The same infrastructure gap that held back fixed-line telephones has curtailed the growth of sub-Saharan Africa's adoption of the internet. While urban areas have had access, either through satellites or one of the few fibre optic cables that served the continent, in many cases bandwidth has been prohibitively expensive.

Data from the International Telecommunications Union of the UN puts internet penetration in Africa at around 16 percent, although there is wild variation between countries. One percent of Ethiopians are online, compared with 28 percent of Kenyans.

That environment is changing. In the past five years, several large cables have made landfall into West and East Africa, serving the economic hubs of Lagos and Nairobi. At the same time, the cost of data-enabled phones and tablets has come down considerably, bringing them into the price range of the continent's emerging middle class. As well as being one of the few global bright spots for Blackberry, Africa is an emerging center of growth for smartphone makers.